The reduction to arcane traitstones from non-boss fights is a bad change and from my experience farming for arcanes takes longer now and is more tedious. I cleared first five difficulties, so that’s 20 non-boss fights and 5 mini-boss fights and I didn’t get a single arcane traitstone.
Apparently the chance to get arcane from mini-boss increases the higher difficulty you’re playing on, but unless it’s a drastic increase (and it doesn’t seem like it is) farming will be slow and tedious, not to mention that newer players probably won’t be able to farm higher difficulties for arcanes and they’re the ones who need them the most.
EDIT: So it seems that on higher difficulties the drop rate of arcanes from mini-bosses is pretty decent. I’ve had alright experience after D6 and my guild mates seem to have good experience getting arcanes from higher difficulties as well. That still might represent a problem for newbies that need traitstones but don’t have strong enough teams to fight in higher difficulty explores though.
Class Experience
You should get more than 1 XP per match from higher difficulties to make up for how long it takes to clear them compared to lower ones.
It just doesn’t make sense for all of them to give the same amount of lousy 1 XP per fight. And if we have to farm high difficulties to have a reasonable chance of obtaining arcane traitstones, leveling classes will be very slow.
Souls
Higher difficulties should give more souls, especially considering we’re going to need gazilion of them now for troop enhancing since it’ll take around 60k souls if not more per troop to fully enhance them with medals, unless I’m mistaken about that.
Are you sure you didn’t just encounter a run of bad luck? It happens sometimes. For example, pre 4.6, I often used my fast traitstone team to farm and it wasn’t uncommon to have long stretches with no Arcanes.
My experience was the opposite of yours in 4.6. I got a few arcanes from non-mini-boss fights. And almost every mini-boss fight I won at the higher difficulties yielded arcanes. In fact, I just finished a mini-grinding session in explore at difficulty 10-12 range now and I don’t remember ever getting anything other than arcanes from mini-bosses.
The main source for arcanes actually is the mythic boss fights, that always drop a guaranteed arcane stone.
All the other dropped stones are a bonus, so to say.
Once people will figure out the best balance between earned mythstones (so access to mythic fights) vs the difficulty tier, it will get more streamlined.
For example, tier 10 is the absolutely best balance for me.
Pretty easy runs, moderately fast, and access to 1 mythic fight every 2nd run.
Basically, 1 guaranteed arcane every 10-11 fights. Plus eventual arcane drops in between. Plus the increased gold rewards (4x more gold on tier 10 compared with old normal explore)
That’s a lot better rates than before, I’d say.
Time-related, 10 fights on tier 10 now ammount roughly for 25-30 fights on normal before.
But even if it may take a bit longer time, generally, it’s absolutely far less monotonuos than normal explore was, and you avoid rng alltogether.
I suspect the most difficult thing is how difficult it now is to judge what Difficulty to farm for maximum benefit.
It’s confusing for end-game players, but will be even more confusing for everyone else. Very analogous to how early-game players feel when they first realise they have no chance of doing all 8 Pet Rescue battles.
Black Manacles and Glutmaws / Gluttonies. That’s how I was getting wins in later stages of pet rescues as a newbie. Took several repeats per stage for luck to kick in, but was doable if you had the patience lol.
But since you want to do explores as quickly as possible a strategy like that wouldn’t be worth bothering with even for newbies in higher difficulties of explore.
My main issue is that I fought for 3+ hours on the Warlord III setting. Nowhere in Sirrians post did I see that I had to go to Casual PvP and set to “Normal”, but after I did, the explore battles became easier.
It’s not mentioned in his post because it’s probably a bug and not an intended feature. I’m sure someone already filed a report or complained about it on the forums so they will probably fix it eventually… maybe… It feels that while they like adding more content they really don’t like fixing bugs and grammatical errors or wrong descriptions lol.
I didn’t know mini boss and boss fights could drop anything but arcane… I’ve got several medals at this point and I have never not received an arcane stone. That’s 1 in 5 or 2 in 6 battles, which is way higher than the 1 in 10 (if you’re lucky) before the update. I don’t need arcane stones anymore but, I thought when playing, “hmm, this will be nice for people who need traitstones.”
No, we’ve been deliberately NOT filing that bug report, because it has significant benefits in another aspect of the game. I recommend not talking about it explicitly on public forums, except in terms of returning Explore to its intended level of challenge.
I know it seems that way, @rojo, but the truth is more complicated. If nothing else, the number of extra clicks and pauses for loading slows everything down, even at D1.
Read the patch notes, they actually lowered the chance to get arcanes from non-boss fights and the chance to get them from boss fights increases with the difficulty (meaning it’s probably very low on level 1 explore)
That probably means that doing level 1 explore now for farming arcanes isn’t good and you’ll have to farm high difficulties instead.
I didn’t see you talk about it in your explore guide. Is that not a suitable place either to discuss the signicant impact? Or maybe I missed it. Nice work on the guide, from what I did see.
Hm, I get a 100% from both boss fights. Compared to before when I often didn’t even get one after 10 battles.
How small players are affected by this, I don’t know. Depends what team they can build. I use the team a guild member suggested: Mang, Divine Ishbaala, Forest Guardian and Moon Rabbit; Titan class (Sentinel, Runepriest or any other with barrier works too) and can beat D12 on WL IV if I want to. [1110,6479,6298,6677,3023,2,1,3,3,2,0,0,14012]
It’s actually a quite simple team, isn’t it? Almost like a pvp meta team. And it’s only useful on high difficulties… on low I’d rather use a soul farm team.
On lowest levels of explore (corresponding to pre-4.6 easy difficulty) it’s common to go 70 (that’s when you amass enough stones for the mythic battle) without getting any now.
